RADIO REVIEW: Your opinion about RTÉ, the licence fee and - what's this they call it? - "public service broadcasting" may well depend upon where you stand on the Paddy O'Gorman Question. .
Should we really be forking over our hard-earned cash (or indeed our ill-gotten gains) so that this distinctly uncommercial character can shuffle around the country pressing intrusive questions on people whose lives have apparently robbed them of the dignity to resist? Answers on an off-colour postcard, please
Life, in O'Gorman's latest radio series, comes in 32 varieties, county by county around Ireland, though some critics might argue it's more like 40 shades of grey. Thirty-Two (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday) this week visited Clare; but anyone who thought this was going to be ceol agus craic for the tourist season was soon put right: if it's music that you're after, go to 2FM.
First stop was Ennistymon, where Paddy stopped a local gentleman outside the pub, a man who, if he couldn't quite shake the dust of London off his workboots, was at least prepared to drink to the memories. "Do you drink a lot?" Paddy asked with typical directness, and though you might think it was a superfluous question, as usual it attracted an honest and thoughtful answer, as well as an invitation to come in for a pint.
O'Gorman stayed outside, where he met a Travelling man. Their conversation was relatively picturesque, centring on goats.
According to this man, even the big dairy farmers in the area keep a goat around so their children will have healthy milk to drink.
"All the children gets it . . . 'Tis the safest milk goin'." 'Tis good for the asthma too, seemingly. This was a man who knew something about children, since he and his wife raised 14 of them in a tent - "camping" as he said. He sounded nostalgic, having only graduated to a caravan in the last 15 years: "Things were a lot handier and simplier (sic) then."
This being Clare, there were bound to be foreigners (including, briefly, a Nigerian woman). In a graveyard O'Gorman met a lovely pair of Welsh tourists - her looking at the Burren flora, him looking for traces of his great-granny. In Doolin there was a snippet of ceol, as a locally based Dutchman sang in a pub about why he came to live in Ireland four years ago.
"Good man, Danny!" the pub applauds. In interview, Danny explains why he gave up busking at the Cliffs of Moher for a proper job, and dismisses any romantic stereotypes about what he's doing here: "No, no, no I'm not in love with an Irishwoman! I'm in love with an American woman that I met in Ireland".
Then Paddy gets a minute with an old German who is about to board his tour-coach - but not before he sings a snatch of It's A Long Way to Tipperary, which his father learned as a prisoner-of-war at Gallipoli.
I'm telling you, all of life is here. Of course, O'Gorman has no problem anywhere in Ireland finding people broke, estranged and in trouble with drugs, drink and the law. "Him battering me for seven years, that was all right, but once he hit the kids, that was it." Yes, it's grim and it's grey and it's someone's way of trying to make sense of life, which makes it the most important thing in the world.
Then, on the other hand, there's the Andy O'Mahony Question. Now there's a broadcaster who commands respect: he's informed, erudite, scrupulous - and frankly I think RTÉ should be forced to pay a fee to the listeners who endure some of his more po-faced evening interview programmes. (Though frankly I'm sure most of those listeners consider themselves to be engaged in a slightly penitential but entirely edifying course of self-improvement.)
This week he interviewed David Byrne, and no, I'm afraid it wasn't the former Talking Heads singer; on the contrary, it was a man for whom "Stop Making Sense" would be simply a redundant injunction. In 30 minutes of Becoming Europeans (RTÉ Radio 1, Tuesday), Ireland's EU Commissioner said nothing that I could make myself construe as a parcel of plain common sense, let alone a pearl of wisdom or a kernel of truth. (Really, I've got a notebook page here with Byrne's name at the top of it, followed by 20 pale blue lines on otherwise blank paper.) What an extraordinary education public life confers, to make a man such as Byrne, clearly an intelligent and decent fellow, utterly incapable of clear, compelling communication via the mass media.
To which Byrne might riposte: "If I'm asked a waffly question . . ." And he wouldn't be wrong. One can only dread what O'Mahony will get up to next Tuesday, when the interview is with another earnest euro-waffler, the European Parliament president, Pat Cox. One is tempted to complain that Becoming Europeans and RTÉ are not being entirely fair and balanced to run such a one-sided pair of interviews in the first flush of build-up to Nice II, but with friends like Byrne and Cox, the referendum scarcely needs enemies.
And if "public service broadcasting" means broadcasting public servants in such flaccid interviews, then you can keep it.
One form of public service that RTÉ has never performed with the same charmless efficiency as its British equivalent is the quasi-scientific documentary, in which the main object of the programming exercise is to state the obvious, and, if you're doing it particularly well, to patronise the audience in the process.
THE latest example is Life as a Teenager (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday), a new series in which someone called Connie St Louis gathers experts and yoof alike to talk us through adolescence.
Programme one this week focused on puberty. Connie helpfully informed us that young teens "often struggle to make sense of what's happening to their bodies".
It's something to do with "raging hormones", apparently. A few teens were lined up to tell vaguely embarrassing stories about their first period or what they weren't told about pubic hair, every one of them speaking in the same generational accent of drawling indifference, whether their voices were broken or, um, intact.
"What's a hormone?" Connie asked one. "I-don'-know," drawled the disgracefully under-informed teen - in a segue that ceded nothing to "Here's the science bit" for pure obviousness. The science bit didn't disappoint either, coming typically complete with talking heads (again, no David Byrne) spouting helpful workaday metaphors that don't tell you a darn thing: gonadotropins, for example, are "the pilot light of reproduction", so they are.
Finally, there were the references to useful reading in the subject area. Pity the poor teen from a nice Radio 4 family who has just been given Everything You Need to Know About Willies by his parents for his summer booklist. Public service? I bet he wishes they'd been watching Sky.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie